Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though. ~ Douglas Adams
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Most people do not comprehend, [no matter how] they encounter such things, nor do they understand what they learn; they believe only themselves. ~ Heraclitus
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Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apple, don’t count on harvesting Golden Delicious. ~ Bill Meyer
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All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see stars.
People searching for a purpose in life — whether or not they are consciously aware of this deep-seated desire — will be attracted to others who have arrived at an answer.
Whales and Lobsters are the foundation of social networks, and Facebook is a machine for turning Whales into CASH. Let’s explore why, and the implications…
The hype around this week’s launch of Facebook Places is misguided. Facebook Places are not about check-ins; they’re about making millions of new Facebook Pages that are monetizable. Foursquare is a sideshow; Twitter is currently Facebook’s main competition for public, lurkable, searchable, transactable Pages for brands. If someone asks why Facebook wants to be in local Pages, echo the immortal words attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.“
To understand why, we once again zoomorphize the Facebook population:
Whales and Lobsters are the foundation of social networks, and Facebook is a machine for turning Whales into CASH. Whales create and share publically, and pay actual CASH; Lobsters consume privately, and occasionally LIKE and comment publically, and pay attention (and time). In the best social networks this creates a virtuous cycle: Celebrities and artists interact with fans, while businesses and organizations interact with customers, and social networks allow the Whales to build deeper relationships with their fans and customers. And vice versa. LIKE a palindrome. LIKE, totally.
A click’s just a click, but a LIKE is a LEAD. Ongoing relationships are the key difference between the mere clicks Google advertisers pay for and the potentially-interactive LIKEs Facebook advertisers pay for. AdWords and AdSense account for 99% of Google’s profit. This is why Google has taken notice (though someone should point out to Google that Like.com has nothing to do with all the billions of daily LIKE buttons they see on the Open Web).
Facebook has only 3 million Whales — Branded Individual and Business Pages — that collectively represent only 5.3 billion clicks of the LIKE button thus far.Facebook by the Numbers hides this fact behind all the statistics about the 500 million Lobsters: the average Facebook user LIKEs fewer than 10 Facebook Pages (divide 5.3 billion by 500 million). And you have to look very carefully to realize that most of the total 5.3 billion LIKEs were unpaid or forced conversions.
Since Whales and LIKEs are essential to Facebook’s revenues, the race is on to win the minds and hearts of Whales and the Lobsters who LIKE them. Facebook may look like Winner Takes All presently, but that’s because Twitter hasn’t really entered the market of charging Whales for LIKEs… yet. Now you may ask yourself: how many Whales and LIKEs does Twitter actually have? It’s a good question because Twitter is pretty tight-lipped about these numbers. But I can guess.
Twitter currently has at least 10 million Whales, and more cu
stomers are willing to FOLLOW something than LIKE it. That’s wild speculation on my part; 10 million comes from Twitter Counter and Twitter’s Lobster count is over 190 million users; with more than 65 million tweets a day, I have no idea how many FOLLOWs the Twitter Whales collectively represent, but anecdotally I know more friends who are willing to FOLLOW things than LIKE things. Facebook gets 20 million LIKEs a day. Whatever the actual number of FOLLOWs a day is, it’s clear from recent WTF features (and their WTF ilk) that Twitter wants to accelerate FOLLOWs sooner rather than later.
Why are Facebook Places so important? 1.5 million Facebook Pages are local businesses, and Facebook needs more Pages. Since almost every celebrity, artist, and global business already has a Facebook Page, local businesses are pretty much the only way for Facebook to increase its lucrative Whale count. So much for the open versus privacy tradeoff: Facebook Places are Facebook Pages, and Facebook Pages are too money to be private. That Facebook also gets to stomp on Google Places only makes it more delicious, but mark my words: Facebook is fighting Twitter for mindshare with the Whales who pay them CASH.
Why do Whales LIKE to pay Facebook? FOLLOW the CASH. My friend Winston, a local business owner in Palo Alto, told me recently that he had little faith in Yelp, FourSquare, Groupon, or even Google Places to move the needle on his business. You heard me: 300k groupons can be wrong because no local business is The Gap. What did he think worked? His Facebook Page. Why? Because he could easily see how many users had visited the Page each day, and the age-sex-location of those users.
Even though Winston received no data about conversion rates and offered no special deals — his Facebook Page, like most, is almost entirely a Placeholder — he zeroed in on the fundamental truth of all brand advertising: that eventually numbers of local eyeballs will convert to local business.The thing that pleased him was simply being able to see the numbers of eyeballs entering the funnel at the top. Facebook’s success is really as simple as being the first business to offer that data visually with such ease of use. Even Foursquare knows that “local businesses love this stuff.“
Now, the early bird gets the worm. The early worm gets… eaten. Is Facebook the annelid in the New Whale Order? Yes, if Twitter can learn enough about what Facebook offers its Whales in exchange for CASH — with the LIKEs and the age-sex-location demographics and the pretty pictures that illustrate funnels. We’re not talking about fixing the unusable mess that is Twitter search or developing the rocket science that is Google Analytics. We’re talking something much simpler and emotionally satisfying than anything Google can provide: Local businesses using the Web to build relationships with their customers. Tweet, and your customers tweet with you; Google, and you Google alone.
My guess is that Twitter already knows everything I just said, and is quietly employing Lesson #4, Part 3: keep your mouth shut.
No wonder Twitter is so… quietly nonchalant. Look carefully, and you’ll see in their eyes the kind of calm that comes from knowing something profound that others are only beginning to wrap their heads around…
~The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants.~ [Waking Life]
You can watch the highlights on your favorite Interweb site, but they won’t really give you the feeling of 90 minutes of tense, do-or-die buildup , culminating in a super charged score in the final minute that propelled Team USA from elimination into first place in their group!
But I realize this is a temporary happiness that comes from adrenaline and other juices pumping through my headmeats. Soon that rush will subside, and I will go back to reflecting my baseline happiness.
A hundred days ago I created this ifindkarma posterous because bakadesuyo inspired me with his. I love to read what he writes, and in particular I love when he reflects about subjects such as happiness.
If I had to distill all of bakadesuyo’s happiness musings into essential reflections, here are the key takeaways I’ve internalized… so far…
Which brings me back to me. If I had to distill all of my happiness musings into eleven essential reflections, here are the key takeaways I’ve externalized… so far…
11. Read these musings, especially the one you’re reading right now. Reflect! Repeat!!! 🙂
And if all else fails, take a step back, breathe, think about a kitten wearing a tiny hat eating a tiny ice cream cone, and regroup. For tomorrow is another day, and we cannot waste today’s time cluttering up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.
Raindrops on roses and tiny hats on kittens aside, I want to take a moment or two to thank Jennifer Aaker and Gretchen Rubin and Tony Hsieh and Niki Leondakis and Caterina Fake for driving me to keep reflecting on happiness as I walk the earth. The tension between being and becoming has become more than an avocation for me… it’s something I’d love to work into my vocation, someday, someway. It is love incarnate.
We conclude this tapestry with a trinity of TED talks that reflect on happiness: Tony Robbins on why we do what we do (emotion!) and how we can do it better (focus!); Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice; and Dan Gilbert on why we are or are not happy:
“Life gives answers in three ways… It says Yes and gives you what you want; it says No and gives you something better; it says Wait and gives you the Best!” (via @IlzeSuna)
“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everyt
hing is ready, we shall never begin.” ~ Ivan Turgenev (via Persia Pele)
“If everything seems under control — you’re just not going fast enough.” ~ Mario Andretti (via Marianne Borenstein)
“I am a professional guitar player. People pay me to stop.” ~ Bob Cleveland (via me)
“Sue Sylvester has hourly flare-ups of burning, itchy, highly contagious talent…” ~ GLEE (via @AmyKeefe)
“Twitter is really going through a detox right now, and it’s trying to get some of the toxins out of its system.” ~ Michael Abbott (via the Merc, still doing better than Yahoo)
“Violence is never the answer, unless the question is, ‘What is never the answer?'” ~ Cleveland Brown (via me)
“Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” ~ Mother Teresa (via @IlzeSuna)
“It is not difficult to love good people. It is difficult to love people as they are.” ~ Juris Rubenis (via @IlzeSuna)
“Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don’t really live at all.” ~ Peaceful Warrior (via Amie Valenzuela)
“Goodbyes are not forever. Goodbyes are not the end. They simply mean I’ll miss you Until we meet again!” (via @IlzeSuna)
Even if you work hard and make wise choices, you still need a little luck. Never forget that.
…but unfortunately then I tweeted about Google which got retweeted and commented on many times, and all of the replies I got on Twitter got lost in a cacophony of random chirping.
My lovely little stream of replies and was flooded with a barrage of randomness, and now whatever conversations I might have had on Twitter about the role of luck are gone.
Even if you have a little luck, you still need to work hard and make wise choices. Never forget that.
…but Facebook keeps diluting the stream so that thread keeps getting pushed down. Which is bad luck for me if I want to find that conversation six months from now.
Hey Facebook, I don’t piss in your swimming pool so stop crapping in my stream!
Is it bad luck that Twitter and Facebook make it so that we never step in the same stream twice, making it futile to see where we used to be? No, that’s by design. My bad luck in losing a potentially great conversation about luck was intentionally caused by the way Twitter and Facebook design streams. Or, put another way:
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Some things attributed to bad luck are actually the consequence of design.
…which makes me wonder how many things I call bad luck are actually caused by someone else intentionally. Sometimes I feel like bad luck is the only luck I have. Maybe it’s my perception that’s off. Maybe it’s my attitude that needs adjusting.
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Yeah, I think that luck would make me happy, but would happiness bring me luck?
I read that and think to myself: Still, there’s that remaining 10%, and that’s the part we need EVEN if we work hard and make wise choices.
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Business idea: figure out how to manufacture luck, and make a fortune. Which is where we started:
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I should invest in a luck factory. I’d make a fortune!
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In the meantime, I’m going to make it a habit to hang out with people who are lucky. My father used to tell me that people with good luck are contagious — as are people with bad luck! He would affirm daily:
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Avoid the unlucky, the unethical, and the unhappy.
So make it a habit to spend time with lucky people… and affirm!!!
And then we LOOK closer and more carefully. We could see that there was nothing. Which is a funny thing to say because sometimes words are inadequate, and sometimes words have two meanings.
And we added things. And the universe expanded. And we added more things. And the universe kept expanding to accommodate adding more things. And everything was awesome. Fundamentally.
It might seem like everything was added randomly. And perhaps that is the case. But that’s not what we believe.
We believe in the interconnectedness of all things.
This idea was kept in the dark for billions of years. Instead, the reigning belief was detachment: “I don’t really want to know how your garden grows, ’cause I just want to fly.” And so, we lived forever…
…and life was but a dream. Edgar Allan Poe waxed poetic, “All that we see or seem… is but a dream within a dream.” (Thanks Ankita!)
And we thought about the words of Rumi…
“We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.“
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.“
“The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your
perception.“
“They say there is a doorway from heart to heart, but what is the use of a door when there are no walls?“
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.“
And the Primitive Radio Gods whispered quietly in the corner…
Am I alive, or thoughts that drift away?
Does summer come for everyone?
Can humans do what prophets say?
If I die before I learn to speak,
can money pay for all the days
I lived awake but half-asleep?
Suddenly we woke up with a kick. And we were no longer detached when we woke up with the idea. Not to spoil Inception, but merely to praise Inception:
“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.“
I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency
Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged — people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
I love The Little Prince. Whi
ch reminds me of some of my favorite words that Robbye Bentley has posted recently…
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” ~ Og Mandino
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Life and Jah are one in the same. Jah is the gift of existence. I am in some way eternal, I will never be duplicated. The singularity of every man and woman is Jah’s gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of what that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth.” ~ Bob Marley
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” ~ Stephen Covey
Thank you, Robbye. I have some favorites of my own, too.
The words of Rumi echo in eternity, “The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.”
“Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” ~ Henry James
“Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for…” ~ Bob Marley
“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” ~ Marilyn Monroe
“If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
“We are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop that never ends. How high can the sycamore grow? If you cut it down, then you’ll never know…” ~ Colors of the Wind
And are there things that cannot be taught? Richard Feynman refuses to explain how magnets work. Feynman concludes, I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.
Breathing is neither learned nor taught. It just is. And yet sometimes we must remember to breathe. And to be here now. And to be grateful for every breath.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.“
Samantha Graham wrote to me today because I was down about the death last week and funeral tomorrow of a loved one, and how grateful I am to be alive. Sam texted:
By the way, this is the first posterous post I’ve composed entirely on the Sprint Evo phone. I wrote it sitting on a porch in southwestern Virginia where cell coverage is roamy but 3G coverage is decent! Thank you Sprint Evo. That it is. Beautiful.
“When I started watching??Lost, I found myself more intrigued by the mysteries than the characters. Over time, though, I have become more moved by the themes and the redemption struggles. In the third season, my engagement with??Lost??changed completely. I???ve previously shared how my wife???s cancer affected the way I processed the show and expressed myself about the show.
I began to see??Lost??not as a mystery to be solved, but an allegory for living in a state of profound, unsettling ambiguity that dealt with the central concerns of life. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? Is there hope? Do we accept our fate or fight it? What happens to us when we die? Will we see our loved ones again after death?
I appreciated that??Lost??ruminated on these questions.”
“Jacob seemed to think that the broken people and damaged souls who came to the Island would embrace the opportunity of a fresh start and naturally blossom into the super-Buddha he was looking for. And why not? As Jacob told Richard, the Island is a place where ???the past doesn???t matter.??? But what he realized is that people have a really hard time letting go of the past. I might also argue that people??shouldn???t??let go of the past; at the very least, we can???t let it rule us, but we do need it to learn from it.“
“Mother, Jacob, and Man-in-Black were contemporaries with Guatama (also Siddhartha) Buddha, who lived from 580-480 BC. The core ideas of Buddhism include the idea of letting go of the things of this world that keep us from recognizing and growing our spiritual nature
and reincarnation and evolution of consciousness through a myriad of lifetimes.”
Ultimately, we should reflect, but we shouldn’t overthink it. LOST, after all, was created by the man with??the mystery box.
Evo will be the greatest phone in 2010. It’s great for phone calls and Gmail and texting and watching high-definition videos and surfing the Internet, and has a pair of incredible cameras for photos/video, a blazingly fast processor, a freakin’ sweet way to play videos from the Internet on your television, a kickstand,??20k applications, and a mobile wifi hotspot application that will let me connect up to eight laptops and devices to the Internet through wifi. It’s the phone that I have been waiting for.
“Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.” I couldn’t find the true source of this quote, which has been attributed to Mark Twain at times, Anne Frank at other times. In any case, I believe it.
I also believe that true happiness comes from within. It’s one of the most important values I have learned and continue to learn. Life, the universe, and everything regularly emphasize that lesson.
When it comes to true happiness, lessons are repeated until they are learned:
RT @ifindkarma: Is there a better song than “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music to expedite Donald Trump’s exit from our White Hous… 9 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: “President* Trump sought to overturn results of a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies… What are… 9 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: “If we refuse to learn anything from the Capitol domestic terrorist attack and we don't hold the traitors who are responsib… 10 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: "If you want to tell a Big Lie, which leads people to storm the Capitol… then you have to expect that people are going to c… 10 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: "THEY COULD HAVE KILLED US ALL... It is a bit much to be hearing that these people would not be trying to destroy our gover… 11 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: “No one is above the law, not even the president of the United States. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our co… 11 hours ago
RT @ifindkarma: “Everyone who came into that Capitol should have been arrested regardless if they didn’t take anything.” Source: https://t.…11 hours ago